The board, rebuilt

The play screen has been the weakest part of this game since the day it worked. It grew a piece at a time, and it showed: the enemy ran the full width of the window and then scrolled away, its meters put the number two thousand pixels from the label it belonged to, and the hand sat at the bottom edge under whatever else had accumulated.

It has been rebuilt to a layout study, and three things moved.

The Ancient gets a column

It is what you are fighting and you look at it constantly, so it is a persistent panel on the left rather than a banner you scroll past. Its meters are capped to that panel, with each value against its own label.

The art is the same drawing the card uses, at panel size

The table grows sideways

One lane per seat. Rounds accumulate to the right at a fixed height, so a long descent widens the lane instead of pushing your hand off the bottom of the screen. The lane whose turn it is keeps its cards readable; the others compact to chips.

Convergence moved into the table’s own footer. It is what the lanes add up to, so it belongs beside the arithmetic it comes from. Sitting next to the Pantheon, Gathering and Grave counts, it read as a fourth deck.

The loop reads in play order

Table, then what you can do, then the cards you do it with. The total used to sit above the actions above the hand, so your attention went up and down the screen on every turn.

The log is a column now rather than a sheet over the board. It is narrower than the overlay was, which is the trade: sentences wrap more often, and the hand, the actions and the Grave stay visible while you read about them.